84w ago - Following up on the previous updates, today PlayStation 3 developer facanferff has made available an update to the Showtime PS3 Plugin TMDB (The Movie DataBase) bringing it to version 1.2.5 followed by v1.3 with the changes below.

To quote: A new version for Showtime Plugin TMDb is now available and adds some features that many users have been asking since day 1.

Please read carefully the changelog and the Important information section as both help you get a better experience in Showtime.

Enhancement: In "Director" field in movie view show all directors instead of just one

Add: TMDb item menu option (it allows users to see a movie view from any video, including offline videos or anything else)

Thanks:

andoma: for creating and maintaining Showtime

Tyrant: for Beta Testing my plugins

Buksa: for giving me the idea to add a Search in Showtime option

Installation:

From plugin central inside Showtime you can download and install the plugin.

Important information:

To use TMDb item menu option you need at least Showtime v4.3.261.

If you have Custom Background by Andreas Oman installed you can use the View images/View Collection images to set as main Showtime background a fanart of a movie (in above screenshots, the background was set using this feature, choosing this image: d3gtl9l2a4fn1j.cloudfront.net/t/p/original/wz1h8VPa8DsofvKvu4mFsktUqfl.jpg)

It may be confusing for some users since a few time ago I said I would not work more in Showtime Plugins, I thought better and decided to make some changes that make me able to continue working in Showtime Plugins, later I'll talk more about it.

Update: A new update to Showtime Plugin TMDb v1.3 is now available. Finding free time has been extremely hard (studying is hard ) so this is what I have to give you right now to enjoy, more features are being prepared by due to time I don't know when will they be ready.

Changelog version 1.3:

Add: Setting to allow show all movies found in a search from item menu

Add: Search for movie by custom title in item menu

Add: Add movies to a list

Note: For now you have to create manually a list in themoviedb.org website. I tried to add this but right now there seems to be some problem with TMDb API so it isn't included for now.

Getting error 404 when attempting to install plugins in showtime version 4.3.536. Seems like it cannot connect to internet. PS3 has internet connection and I can see browse on it fine. Any suggestions pls...

Following up on the previous revision, today PlayStation 3 homebrew developer Andreas Oman updated the Showtime PS3 Media Player testing builds to v04.03.698 followed by Showtime for multiMAN (both CEX and DEX) by deank with the changes outlined below.

upnp: Add more URLs in device description
settings/store: Fix lock inversion Fixes #1837
ssdp: Remove unused code
ssdp: If we fail to bind, retry later Fixes #1838
Update translation files: Swedish, dk_DK, zh_CN
Make system name configurable in Settings -> Network
hls: Drop astray FA_DEBUG
asyncio: Handle errors from poll() in a more resilient way poll() on ps3 can return error if there is a problem with one of the fd:s
If settings storage can't use rename to overwrite, just log a debug message
Improve ext subtitle load debug
ASYNCIO: Add names to all file descriptor structs
When ASYNCIO Poll error occurs, output more info in log
subtitles: Fix some memory leaks when loading ext subs
When user can rename discovered services, revert to original name if configured name is empty

4.3.628

Upgrade librtmp - Fixes bug with DecodeTEA on BE systems. Fixes #1774
upnp: One more fix. Fixes #1788
upnp: Use URL to video file as canonical URL
Rework how continous video playback build the video play list. Fixes #1819
audio: Fix assert() in pulseaudio when skipping to next video track
upnp: Fix issue causing names of UPNP services to be messed up
ps3: Nag a bit more about donations if it's never turned on by the user
HLS: More robust handling of corrupted segments
RTMP: Set media source info. Fixes #1822
hls: Avoid calling sub_scanner repeatedly if nothing will be scanned by it
httpclient: Deal with "206 Partial Content" when we didn't ask for it.

Here is the standalone version of Showtime 04.03.698 compiled by me with all the standard changes:

Showtime for multiMAN is available as usual within mM/mmCM in the VIDEO column (press [Triangle] over "Start Showtime" and select "UPDATE").

CEX/DEX standalone versions are also available for direct download (as .pkg) in the WEB column of multiMAN/mmCM.

glw: Fix some nastyness related to how we resolve properties This fixes a long standing issue with image view in the UI, causing just the spinner to appear and no image to be shown
hls: Fix issues when seeking past end of track when doing continous play
osk: Replace ¤ with $
Upgrade: Don't fail patch upgrade attempt if we can't open target file to get current hash
Add Slovak translation
Improve event routing

ps3: Fix bug in litecoin miner causing it to be a lot less efficient than it should be
ps3: Relax memory warning thresholds a bit. Now that we use TLSF it's much less of a problem
stos: sync() after critical writes to disk
Fix crash in UPNP code Fixes #1773
js: Add support for plugins to set cookies directly
ps3: Add a miner
Transfer Copyright to Lonelycoder AB
prop: Disable prop subscription stats
prop: Redeuce memory usage by reusing compile time strings during prop symlinking
prop: Correctly handle settings of a PROP_DIR to some other value
glw/view: Improve trace() function a bit
prop/core: We must use prop_ref_dec_locked() when prop_mutex is held Fixes #1797
ps3: Make it possible to edit discovered FAT and HDD sources from settings
ps3: Add NTFS support
httpclient: Fix broken cookie domain validation Fixes #1794
Add so called 'managed services'
Huge rework of prop tree symbolic links
Add missing title and contents for network discovered services
Add str_cleanup() helper
ps3: Add some mutex debug helpers
Update fr_FR.lang
Update it_IT.lang
glw: Fix problem when assigning 'args' attribute with a non-prop p Fixes #1776

From aldostools: Build 4.3.582 has two important changes since 4.3.576:

ps3: Fix bug causing NTFS drives not being able to be remounted
ps3: Show CPU and RSX temperature in sysinfo (Press L3 to view)

For more details: github.com/andoma/showtime/commits/master

From deank: I compiled showtime 4.3.582 for mM... It is available in the WEB column of multiMAN and also from the VIDEO column -> Update. Standalone versions are in the web column.

Update: v4.3.601 Testing Changelog:

subtitles/sub: Watch out for division by zero
glw: Fix minor memleak (one per glw session)
Fix play/pause issues
glw: Rework how we auto-rescale UI
audio: Fix invalid assert()
ftpserver: Add support for "OPTS UTF8 ON/OFF" and report is as a FEATure
Resolve prop for track in playqueue
audio: When flushing pipeline we must also flush resampler
builtin-osk: Add '@' character and close when user press back/exit button
Drop shoutcast support
httpserver: Send encoding as UTF-8 in various places
Fix 'use after free'
miner: Drop debug info
ps3: Fix bug causing NTFS drives not being able to be remounted.
ps3: Show CPU and RSX temperature in sysinfo (Press L3 to view)

Following up on the previous update, today PlayStation 3 developer facanferff has made available a Quickstart to PS3 Plugin Development in Showtime with details below.

To quote: Since a long time ago, some users have requested me to write a tutorial so they could create their own Showtime plugins. This is an initial attempt to it, I hope you like. If I make some mistake, I'm sorry, I'm not a teacher.

Overview

Before we get our hands dirty, it’s important to explain some little things that might help you later in making your own plugins. Plugins for Showtime (also known as Apps) are exclusively written, at the moment, in Javascript. To bring plugins to life, Showtime uses a Javascript engine called Spidermonkey (as of now, Showtime uses Spidermonkey 1.8.0-rc1). To learn more about this engine, you may go to developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/SpiderMonkey.

If you ever did web development, you may wonder if the Javascript API that work in normal web browser might work here, well, the answer is no. Due to this, you will not find things like DOM or AJAX in your toolbox, but you may and should use the basic Javascript.

In this quickstart, I will assume the reader has good understanding of Javascript. If you don’t know it, you may check the several resources available online/offline. From these, I recommend check this: codecademy.com

The Showtime plugins’ job is to respond to browse and search requests and populate the internal data model with the actual information to be shown to the user via Showtime’s user interface(s).

Since there are different types of plugins, I will focus in this tutorial in only a type, plugins that browse content in the web and show it to user (e.g. Youtube plugin).

Structure of a plugin

Every plugin lives in a directory of their own. From the several files this directory may have, you need to have at least one file in the root of the plugin, plugin.json, which contains information about the plugin and the author. You may use sub-directories and custom names for other files in order to organize it better.

plugin.json

plugin.json is a JSON (json.org) encoded text file containing information about the plugin and its author. Example of a plugin.json file (from the Channel9 plugin):

The flag –p means that you want to load a plugin in development environment.

If you ran this already, you might get the following error: This will output something like: plugins [ERROR]: Unable to load development plugin: testplugin Unable to load testplugin/plugin.json -- File not found. This means or we don’t have a testplugin directory or we don’t have a plugin.json inside it. To create the directory do:

With this, we specified that the plugin testplugin uses Javascript engine, has an ID ‘testplugin’ and the script is ‘testplugin.js’.

Whenever you want to reload the plugin you can use Shift+F5 in Showtime. This is helpful when you make changes to a plugin already in development environment inside Showtime, without the need of restarting Showtime. Even if the plugin gave an error, you may use this to try to reload it. When you reload it, all hooks and resources associated to the plugin are removed. This phenomenon happens also when a user removes a plugin from Showtime.

In case you are already in a page that belongs to the plugin itself, Showtime will reload the plugin and reload the page itself.

Now open your testplugin/testplugin.js in a text editor. Since we want to have a plugin that lives forever (so it can be called anytime) we need to have a scope where all local variables will live and also need to remember ‘this’ which is, when the script is invoked, a plugin object created by Showtime itself (showtimemediacenter.com/projects/showtime/wiki/JSAPI_plugin).

Reload the plugin now with Shift+F5, if you look in the terminal windows from which you opened Showtime, you will find a line saying ‘Hello, Showtime XXX’ where XXX is your current Showtime version that was obtained via showtime.currentVersionString .

Routing an URI to the plugin

Since our plugin will respond to browse requests we need to have an URI associated to it. An URI is something like a URL you use to browse the Internet, but in this case it is used to browse in Showtime. Every plugin reservers URI space starting with the plugin’s ID specified in plugin.json. These URI routes registered by plugins have higher priority than URI routes that Showtime itself handles, so you can create an URI route like it is in a web browser (e.g. youtube.com)

With this new knowledge let’s make it in use (edit it to match this code):

Now, reload the plugin and if you type “testplugin:hello” in the search input field on Showtime’s home page, you will notice Showtime will open a new page with only a loading symbol, but in the terminal it will show the message provided to showtime.print.

A look in a real plugin

For this tutorial, I decided to use a real plugin made by me, which is called Videocopilot. The plugin source is located at github.com/facanferff/showtime-plugins/tree/master/videocopilot and its a plugin for Web site videocopilot.net.

Here, plugin.addURI registers a new URI route, in this case called “videocopilot:start” and startPage is the function to be called when this route is open by user request. The function provided to addURI should accept at least one argument, where the 1st one is a page object created by Showtime and used to manipulate the page.

Here, page.appendItem will append a new item to the current page. Lets see the arguments:

1st: PREFIX + ':browse:' + escape('http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/') + ':undefined' , is the URI route that should be called when the user clicks this item

2nd: type of item, from the several ones, the most used are: directory, used to specify this item will open a new page to browse contents; and video that specified this item will open a video resource

3rd: metadata for the item, you may provide any information about this item as you want. The most used are: title, title of the item; icon, image to be shown associated to the item; description, a description of the item

Here, page.source is the way to tell Showtime what we want to reproduce. Since we want to play a video we need to put always “videoparams:” before the parameters of video as specified before encoded in a JSON string.

This function is used to add continuously items to a page. In the current version of the tutorial, I will not explain this, so whenever you want to show more items (e.g. of a second page) use page.appendItem and pass what you need.

This function adds a searcher to Showtime that can be used when a user searches for something (not a URI route) in search input field in Showtime’s home page. This function accepts 3 arguments:

1st: title of the searcher, shown to user when searching something

2nd: image of the search, also shown to user

3rd: function that receives a page and query arguments (page is the same as specified before in the tutorial and query is a string containing what to search). This function is runs always whenever a user searches for something.

Note: In the function passed to plugin.addSearcher you need to specify somewhere the number of found entries via page.entries, otherwise Showtime will not show your searcher to user for that query.

I recommend you study carefully the code at: github.com/facanferff/showtime-plugins/blob/master/videocopilot/videocopilot.js

Publishing plugins

You may check showtimemediacenter.com/projects/showtime/wiki/SPMC for all details about it.

I hope, you learned a little about plugin development in Showtime with this small tutorial. This tutorial is far away from being finished, I just wanted to give you an initial overview to the process of creating plugins for Showtime.

With a look in a real plugin, I believe you have now the fundamental tools to study better existing plugins and create new plugins. Whenever I can, I will try to update this tutorial to make it more complete and easier to understand.

For a reference of the functions Showtime provides I recommend you check showtimemediacenter.com/projects/showtime/wiki/JSAPIREF

And to conclude I leave here a screenshot of plugin TMDb so you can see the potential you can get from a plugin (below).